That is a very good point. I would go even further and say that Canonical, too, shouldn't have to apply patches. That's upstream kernel's job.

But here's the rub - on some hardware enabling SATA PM can sometimes lead to various weird bugs - from failure to boot to crash with blank screen after few hours of working perfectly. And Intel would't release any sort of documentation that sheds any light on why that is the case, and what should be done to avoid it. Intel does know what to do, since (sic) Intel's storage drivers do the right thing on Windows.

Which brings us to even stranger point: Intel apparently doesn't share this documentation with Microsoft either. Hence new laptops with pre-installed Windows ship with Intel's storage drivers, while installing vanilla Windows 10 with Microsoft's storage drivers will give you as bad a battery life, as you get under Linux. This is an issue important enough that some laptop vendors employ hardware tricks to make storage hardware "invisible" for normal Microsoft's drivers for no good purpose other than to enable Intel's driver take over this hardware smoothly. See for example recent "Lenovo fake RAID" debacle:

http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/44694.html